18 TheEconomistNovember 28th 2020
1I
n early november justices at India’s Su-
preme Court turned their attention to an
urgent plea. Arnab Goswami, a prominent
journalist, had been dragged from his
home and hurled into jail. Government
ministers decried the arrest as an assault
on free speech, demanding that Mr Gos-
wami be granted bail. The hearing was
brief. “If we as a constitutional court do not
lay down law and protect liberty, then who
will?” proclaimed one judge. That evening
Mr Goswami swept out of Mumbai’s Taloja
prison into a rapturous crowd. “This is a
victory for the people of India!” he crowed.
But was it? To much of India’s commen-
tariat, Mr Goswami’s case represented not a
test of freedom so much as a test of power.
On its current trajectory, by all evidence (as
the chart on the next page illustrates), the
world’s largest democracy is headed to a fu-
ture that is less, not more free.
Mr Goswami is a controversial figure.
He has pioneered a style of attack journal-
ism that makes his nightly television pro-
gramme look like a show trial from China’sCultural Revolution. Its victims are often
critics of government policy. They are typi-
cally reduced to a corner box as Mr Gos-
wami swells into a finger-jabbing prosecu-
tor, denouncing them as “antinational” or,
worse, an agent of Pakistan.
What landed Mr Goswami in jail was not
something he said, though his tirades
against the Mumbai police have indeed en-
raged the local government, which hap-
pens to be opposed to the prime minister,
Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata
Party (bjp). The journalist’s alleged crime
involved a big unpaid debt to a decorator,
who had left a suicide note blaming him,
among others, for his fatal distress. “Abet-
ment” to suicide remains an offence in In-
dia. The case had been closed in 2019, when
the bjpstill wielded power in Mumbai, and
its reopening smacked of a vendetta.
So the court’s ruling was not surprising.
What shocked was the speed of its inter-
vention. Mr Goswami spent just a week in
detention, and his case had hardly reached
the lowest rung of courts, yet the country’stopmost judges ignored the court’s backlog
of some 60,000 cases to schedule a bail
hearing within a day of the anchor’s appeal.
This is in a country where prisons hold
twice as many inmates awaiting trial, some
330,000 people, as they do convicts.
A majority of these “undertrials” come
from minority groups and a quarter have
spent more than a year behind bars, reck-
ons Leah Verghese, a law researcher. When
Mr Modi clamped direct rule on the erst-
while state of Jammu and Kashmir in Au-
gust last year, thousands of its residents
were detained. Out of more than 550 writs
of habeas corpus such as Mr Goswami’s
that Kashmiris filed, courts have disdained
to look at all but a handful.
In the same week that Mr Goswami won
his swift reprieve, Father Stan Swamy, an
83-year-old Jesuit priest who has champi-
oned rights for tribal peoples and is being
held as an alleged Maoist terrorist, made a
plea before a lower court. As he suffers
from Parkinson’s disease and cannot hold a
cup steady, lawyers requested that he be al-
lowed to have a straw in his prison cell. The
court postponed the hearing for 20 days.
Even more striking is the courts’ foot-
dragging over constitutional questions. In
2017 Mr Modi slipped through parliament a
controversial law that created “electoral
bonds”, asserting that as a budgetary mat-
ter it need not be scrutinised by the upper
house, which was not then in bjpcontrol.
The Supreme Court still has not examinedSubcontinental drift
DELHI
A power-hungry prime minister threatens to turn India into a one-party stateBriefing Democracy in India